Years ago companies located many employees in specific office spaces and the employees could arrange those spaces to customize for their specific needs. Typically, an employee would arrange work surfaces, a computer including a display screen and a keyboard, a task chair, lighting, and perhaps other affordances within their personally assigned space to meet their needs.
Business models have changed and so too have the demands on employees such that many employees are now required to travel among many different locations throughout the country and indeed around the world to perform work activities. For instance, a sales manager may need to travel between three different mid-western cities to meet with three regional sales representatives during the course of a day. Here, each meeting may be scheduled for one hour so that the manager has several hours of down time while not in one of the meetings or traveling between meeting locations. For instance, the manager may have two hours of “free” (e.g., unscheduled) time between the first and second meetings and another three hours of “free” time between the second and third meetings. The first two hours may be spent in an airport and the three later hours may be spent at a company facility.
In the above example, while the manager has unscheduled time when not traveling between meetings or attending meetings, most employees have plenty of personal or work activities to perform during these unscheduled times. For instance, the manager in the above example may need to work on a quarterly sales presentation due in three weeks, may need to work on setting up additional meetings or travel plans for coming weeks, may need to participate in an impromptu teleconference call with her boss located at a company headquarters on the west coast, may need to place a personal phone call to her husband, etc.
To facilitate these personal tasks, many companies have built out and fitted spaces with affordances designed to support personal activities that can be used by traveling employees on a temporary basis. For instance, in some cases, small offices have been constructed for temporary use that include computers linked to a network, a work surface, a task chair, etc. Here, an employee at a company location with unscheduled time may locate and use one of these personal spaces for an hour, half a day, or more if needed. Temporary use of an office is often referred to in the industry as “hotelling”.
While hotelling and publically located furniture are useable to accomplish personal and individual work activities, these solutions have several shortcomings. First, in the case of temporary office spaces, often times the purpose of these affordances (e.g., to support hotelling activity) are not apparent to temporarily located employees. For instance, hotelling offices often have essentially the same appearance and affordances as personal offices used daily by local employees so that the hotelling use is not apparent. In addition, it may not be apparent to a traveling employee that an office with a closed door is available for hotelling. Even if an employee knows a specific office is reserved for hotelling, the employee may be confused by a closed door to the space as to whether or not the space is currently available, is scheduled for use by another employee currently or in the near future, etc.
Second, because of their structural requirements and general appearance, hotelling offices are often provided in out of the way locations as opposed to right in the open where traveling employees are most likely to encounter the arrangements. For instance, it is atypical for walls that constitute a small office space to be constructed in the middle of an open generally common space (e.g., an airport lobby, a facility cafeteria, etc.) as the structure would break up the space and severely degrade the overall look and feel of the space. Where hotelling arrangements are positioned in out of the way locations, use of those arrangements is substantially reduced.
Third, in many cases, while a company may want to provide spaces optimized for individual work activities when traveling employees are unscheduled for a time, many companies also want travelling employees at least somewhat “visible” to others in their facilities to encourage impromptu meetings or conversations between employees. Out of the way small hotelling offices do not facilitate impromptu meetings. Exacerbating the problem, walled hotelling offices typically form a complete barrier between a traveling employee and local employees within a facility.
Fourth, while walled spaces are often optimized for some employees to accomplish focused work activities, in many cases employees feel claustrophobic within walled spaces and therefore avoid using such spaces. This is particularly true in the case of small hotelling offices where full wall structures exacerbate the closed in feeling.
Fifth, because hotelling spaces are often fitted out with “nice” affordances, in many cases hotelling spaces cannot be located in particularly useful “public” spaces. For instance, a hotelling space that includes a high end task chair or plug in task light cannot typically be located in an airport lobby as the chair and light may be taken from the space. Similarly, local employees recognizing the value of a high end task chair or other non-fixtured (e.g., not permanently attached) affordances may be inclined to swap their chair for the high end chair either temporarily or permanently which defeats the purpose of providing the high end affordance to the traveling employee.
Sixth, while most employees and others (e.g., visiting customers or clients, services providers, etc.) do not abuse space affordances, sometimes affordances become damaged or just simply show wear over time. This is particularly true where a set of affordances includes some affordances that can move and collide with other affordances which can cause damage to the set. For instance, where a task chair is moveable relative to a work surface, chair arms may collide with a work surface and damage both an arm of the chair and the edge of the work surface. Where a work surface is supported for movement within a space, the work surface may collide with another work surface or with a space defining wall structure resulting in damage to the overall arrangement. While people typically continue to use affordances in their own personal space as they become worn or somewhat damaged, these degradations almost always substantially reduce use of hotelling accommodations. For instance, a somewhat worn chair in a hotelling space typically substantially reduces the use of that space. Damage to a cubicle or office wall or work surface often substantially reduces use of that space.
To address many of the problems with walled hotelling office spaces, partial wall cubicle spaces have been used to configure hotelling spaces in some cases. Here, the cubicle wall leaves an upper open area which reduces claustrophobic feelings and enables persons passing by a space to determine who is temporarily located within the space. While cubicles solve some of the problems described above, they do not address most of the problems. For instance, the appearance of most cubicle configurations is not suitable for use in many open common spaces and therefore, like small offices, cubicle type hotelling spaces are often tucked away and are not as easily identifiable as would be optimal. Where arrangement affordances are moveable and not restricted from collision, component damage is likely. Cubicles do nothing to eliminate the possibility of non-fixtured affordances being removed from hotelling spaces.
In other cases companies provide couches or lounge chairs in public spaces that can be used on a temporary basis by employees to attend to personal or work activities during unscheduled time. While couches or lounge chairs in open spaces are useful, these options clearly do not afford any sense of privacy to travelling employees. In addition, in most cases these options often do not provide optimized affordances like lighting, supporting work surfaces, etc. Even where some type of supporting work surface is provided, those surfaces are typically relatively small and may not support substantial weight.
Similar needs exist in other public and semi-public spaces for affordances that enable a user to have some privacy in a comfortable environment while still being generally disposed n a public space. For instance, these needs are also prevalent in a library or educational environment, in a school campus environment, etc.
Thus, there is a need for a new type of workspace arrangement that is aesthetically appealing so that it can be placed at any location within a facility including generally open common spaces which provides at least some sense of privacy to a user yet still feels open and enables the user to have a sense of persons proximate the user's space. It would also be advantageous if such an arrangement is particularly inviting to users, has an intuitive design and has a design that minimizes or substantially eliminates the possibility of affordance use or movement damaging arrangement features.